“Apple’s Steve Jobs is a modern icon, but biographers have painted his character with a wide brush,” Jonny evans writes for Computerworld. “That’s why many who worked with Jobs seem keen to give us a much better insight into the man. Here are six Steve Jobs stories we learned this month.”
Here’s one:
Evans writes, “Jobs knew he could make mistakes, and was quite capable of trusting his team to identify and fix them. Stanford Business tells a story (republished by Inc.com) from Apple’s former retail chief, Ron Johnson: ‘Before Apple opened its first store in May 2001, Johnson was riding with Steve Jobs to a weekly planning meeting. ‘We’ve organized it like a retail store around products, but if Apple’s going to organize around activities like music and movies, well, the store should be organized around music and movies and things you do,’ Johnson confessed. Jobs turned to him and said, ‘Do you know how big a change that is? I don’t have time to redesign the store.'” Ten minutes later, Jobs walked into the meeting and said, ‘Well, Ron thinks our store is all wrong. And he’s right, so I’m going to leave now. And Ron, you work with the team and design the store.'”
Read more in the full article here.
We go into this meeting and say Steve, let’s work together to make your Macs better for enterprise customers. Jobs looks at us and says ‘Why would I do anything for that orifice called the CIO?’”
I’m still smiling.